Responsive Web Design

One Website For All Devices

You need to be where your customers are. And your customers are using their mobile devices and tablets to search for you. If you’re stuck with an unresponsive website, the potential customers who find you on their smartphone will find your website skewed and hard to read. The result? Those customers are no longer a potential customers. Nope. They’re already long gone.

The solution? Responsive Web design. With this approach to website design it means that your website will respond to the increasing amount of user’s who’s behavior and environment changes based on screen size, platform and orientation. By changing your website into a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries, your customers won’t blink once with frustration when they switch from their laptop to find you on their smartphone or tablet. With this switch, your website will automatically respond to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. This will eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market, and make your life as a business owner that much easier.

Enter Responsive Web Development / Design.

In the past, the only real way to address this problem was to build out multiple versions of your website to suit the multiple devices on the market. Trust us, it is as frustrating as it sounds. With this solution it required a large investment of both resources & development time to produce results, and in most cases it resulted in huge inconsistency across different devices.

Now, think of your website as transforming into a ballerina when once it was strictly a statue. The entire design of a Responsive Website is a mix of fluid grids, images and smart mark-ups where needed to create a website that can go from laptop to smartphone fluidly without the end user knowing.

What Does a Responsive Website Design Look Like?

A responsive website code is where the magic is. Thankfully we have seen the emergence of HTML5 / CSS3 Media queries which have now enabled the practice of Responsive Web Development & Responsive Web Design. Within the code, we use a number of techniques to achieve fluid grids and images for any sized screen. Creating fluid grids is a fairly easy task, but creating fluid images pose more of a problem. To solve this problem we use a number of techniques, which include: hiding and revealing portions of images, creating sliding composite images, and images that scale with the layout.

Traditional Desktop Monitor

In the first image, the browser is wide, (landscape) just as it is on a traditional desktop / laptop computer, with the page elements spaced out horizontally featuring multiple columns / large hero images in the slider.

Tablet, iPad landscape And Tablet, iPad Portrait

With these images, the browser window is now slightly narrower, as it may be when viewing on a Tablet. You will also notice that the design has now shifted due to the “CSS3 Media Query” that has been determined in the websites style sheet (CSS). The header is now simplified & the main content area has also been reduced and both the header / footer navigation have been condensed.

The Smartphone

These images show how the design is displayed on a Smartphone Mobile Device. Here, you will notice that the browser width is considerably narrower to accommodate the smaller screen size. The header navigation is now stacked & the hero image slider has been condensed, but still displays within the frame of the phone. The flow of the page content has been maintained, with the content being clear & easy to navigate despite a smaller browser size.

The End Result: What You Get With a Responsive Website Design

With a fully responsive website design you get a customized website for every device on the market, which will ensure that your customers are having the very best user-experience possible, now and in the future. At Live Page Cafe, we started making responsive websites when the technology was brand new, and we now only make responsive websites. We make them at affordable prices too. Contact us for more information.